Transcription
In 1953, the steel industry employed 650,000 Americans, and most of them worked within a few hundred miles of the same body of water. From Buffalo across to Cleveland, down through Youngstown and Pittsburgh, up through Gary and into Detroit and Chicago, the Great Lakes region was the richest concentration of industrial wealth the world had ever seen. It accounted for more than half of all American manufacturing jobs and roughly 45% of the nation's entire economic output.
The region didn't just make steel. It made the cars, the tires, the glass, the rubber, the appliances, and the heavy machinery that the rest of the planet was buying as fast as America could produce it. If you had picked up a globe in 1953 and asked where the money was, the honest answer was a belt of smoke stack cities draped along the southern shore of the Great Lakes. And nearly every dollar of that wealth depended on a single piece of technology, a furnace.
The Open Hearth furnace had been the backbone of American steel making since the 1880s. It was slow. It took 8 to 12 hours to refine a batch of steel. It was energy-intensive. It required enormous amounts of fuel to maintain its heat. But it was what the mills knew and it worked. And by the 1940s, more than 80% of all the steel produced in the United States came out of open hearth furnaces. The men who ran those furnaces and the executives who built their empires around them had no particular reason to wonder whether there might be a better way to do the job. They were winning. They were winning so completely that the question didn't even occur to them.
That confidence had roots going back half a century. In December of 1900, at a now legendary dinner at the University Club in Manhattan, a 38-year-old steel executive named Charles Schwab, stood up and gave a speech to a room full of bankers. The most important man in the room was not Schwab, but the man seated next to him, John Perpont Morgan, the most powerful financier in the world. Schwab's speech was carefully crafted. He laid out a vision, a single corporation that would consolidate the nation's fragmented steel industry, end the ruinous cycle of price wars and overproduction, and dominate the market. Morgan was persuaded. Within weeks, he opened negotiations with Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born industrialist whose Carnegie Steel Company was by far the largest producer in the country. Carnegie agreed to sell for approximately $480 million in bonds and stock. A staggering figure, the equivalent of something like 15 billion today.
On February 25th, 1901, the United States Steel Corporation was incorporated in New Jersey with an authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion. It was the world's first billion-dollar corporation. In its first full year of operations, US Steel produced 67% of all the steel made in the United States. It employed a fleet of Great Lakes freighters. It owned railroads that hauled iron ore from Minnesota, coal from Appalachia, and limestone from Michigan. It was, in the language of Wall Street, simply "the corporation" because no qualifier was necessary.
The geography of the industry was dictated by raw materials and transportation. Iron ore came from the Msabi range in northern Minnesota, shipped by freighter down through the Great Lakes to ports along the southern shores: Gary, Cleveland, Buffalo. US Steel operated the Pittsburgh Steamship Company, the largest commercial fleet on the Great Lakes, hauling ore across cold water to feed its furnaces. Coking coal came up from western Pennsylvania and West Virginia by rail to Pittsburgh where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers converged. The Clairton Coke works south of Pittsburgh became the largest coking facility in North America. The steel that came out of those furnaces then traveled outward by rail and barge to build the physical infrastructure of the 20th century: the bridges, the skyscrapers, the automobiles, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the rails themselves.
The cities that grew around this process were not incidental to it. They were created by it. Gary, Indiana did not exist before steel. In 1906, US Steel purchased roughly 10,000 acres of swamp land and sand dunes on the south shore of Lake Michigan, 30 miles from Chicago, and built a city from nothing. They named it after Elbert Henry Gary, the corporation's founding chairman, a lawyer and former judge who had never swung a hammer in his life. By 1908, the Gary Works plant was operating. Workers poured in, immigrants from more than 50 countries in the city's first 15 years, and black families arriving from the deep south as part of the Great Migration, drawn by wages that no southern employer would match. Gary hit 100,000 residents by 1930. They called it the "magic city" because nothing had ever grown that fast. By the 1950s, its population approached 178,000, making it Indiana's second largest city, and Gary Works, with its 12 blast furnaces, and more than 30,000 employees, was the largest steel mill in the world. A downtown commercial strip along Broadway hummed with department stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. A Broadway musical, *The Music Man*, written in 1957, featured a song called "Gary, Indiana," in which a con man wistfully recalled the prosperous town as his hometown. The joke is that the play is set in 1912. Gary had barely existed 6 years by then.
The same pattern repeated across the region. Detroit's population hit 1.85 million in 1950, making it America's fourth largest city with 296,000 manufacturing jobs, almost entirely on the strength of the auto industry. Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, the Big Three, had their headquarters there. And by 1965, they controlled 90% of all American vehicle sales. The assembly line, which Henry Ford had pioneered at his Highland Park plant in 1910, had made Detroit the manufacturing capital of the world. During the war, the Ford Willow Run plant in Dearborn produced a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes. An engineering feat so staggering that the factory was nicknamed the "Arsenal of Democracy." New car sales across the United States quadrupled between 1945 and 1955, and nearly all of those cars were made by companies headquartered in or around Detroit. The city had the highest median income in America, and for black workers migrating north, offered something that existed almost nowhere else: a genuine path to the middle class. Ford Motor Company was one of the largest private employers of African-Americans in the country.
Cleveland peaked at 915,000 residents. It had been the first city in the world to install an electric traffic signal. And its Euclid Avenue, lined with mansions, had been called the "most beautiful street in the world" by at least one visiting European dignitary. Pittsburgh, which had produced half the nation's steel through the mid-1950s, was the eighth largest city in America. Andrew Carnegie had used his steel fortune to endow libraries, museums, and what became Carnegie Mellon University. Andrew Mellon, the banker and industrialist, built a financial empire there and became Secretary of the Treasury. Pittsburgh's smoke-blackened skyline was so iconic that residents joked about going through two white shirts a day. Youngstown, Ohio, a city of 170,000 people, was the country's third largest steel producer, so thoroughly dominated by mills that children set their clocks by the noon whistle and fell asleep at night to the orange glow of molten steel reflecting off the sky. By the 1920s, four out of five residents of Youngstown were immigrants or the children of immigrants: Italians, Slovaks, Croatians, Greeks, Welsh, who had come for the wages. Akron was the rubber capital of the world. Goodyear, Firestone, Goodrich, General Tire, all headquartered within a few miles of each other. Buffalo was a flour milling and steel powerhouse. Its wealth reflected in grand civic buildings and an arts district funded by industrial money. Flint, Michigan existed because of General Motors. The company was founded there in 1908 by William Durant.
These cities were not merely wealthy. They had among the highest rates of homeownership in the country. They had symphony orchestras and department stores and movie palaces and hotels that rivaled anything in New York. Youngstown had a millionaire's row on its north side lined with mansions. Gary had its City Methodist Church, a soaring Gothic structure built in 1926 with partial funding from US Steel. A young crooner from Steubenville named Dino Crocetti, later known as Dean Martin, would occasionally come up to Youngstown's Jungle Inn just outside the city limits to sing a few songs and deal blackjack. The money, the architecture, the cultural life, all of it sat on the same foundation. And the foundation was the furnace.
Here is where the story turns. In the early 1950s, two Austrian steel makers, the companies known as Voest and ÖMV, developed a new steelmaking process. Instead of the open hearth method, which used gas or oil to heat molten iron over many hours, the new process blew pure oxygen directly into the molten metal, burning off excess carbon at extraordinary speed. A batch of steel that took 8 hours in an open hearth furnace could be completed in about 40 minutes using this basic oxygen process. The investment costs per ton were lower. The energy costs were lower. The quality of the finished product was in many applications superior. The first commercial basic oxygen furnace began operating in Linz, Austria in 1952.
Now, two categories of steelmakers existed in the world at that moment. The first category was countries like Japan and West Germany whose steel industries had been bombed into rubble during the war. They had to rebuild from scratch. When they rebuilt, they built with the latest available technology, the basic oxygen furnace. Japan, in particular, moved aggressively. Japanese engineers improved on the Austrian design, developing a multi-hole oxygen lance that made the process even more efficient. By the late 1950s, Japan's rebuilt steel industry was among the most modern on Earth.
The second category was the United States. America's mills had not been bombed. They were intact. They had just spent a decade running at full capacity to feed the post-war boom. And they were making an enormous amount of money doing it exactly the way they'd always done it. US Steel's revenues quintupled between 1938 and 1951 from $611 million to more than $3.5 billion. Why would you tear out a furnace that was printing money and replace it with something unproven? The executives at US Steel and Bethlehem Steel, the two dominant producers, looked at the oxygen process and decided to wait.
The first oxygen converters in the United States were installed at the end of 1954, not by US Steel or Bethlehem, but by a company called McLouth Steel, a small operation in Trenton, Michigan, that accounted for less than 1% of national steel production. McLouth adopted the new technology because it had nothing to lose. The giants saw no reason to follow. US Steel and Bethlehem Steel did not introduce the oxygen process until 1964, a full decade after McLouth and 12 years after the Austrians had proved it commercially viable. By then, the damage was accumulating.
In 1959, the United States became a net importer of steel for the first time in its history. That sentence deserves to sit for a moment. A country that had produced more steel than the rest of the world combined during World War II was now buying more steel from abroad than it sold. The arithmetic behind that shift was brutal but simple. Japanese and German mills built with oxygen furnaces could produce a ton of steel faster, cheaper, and with fewer workers than an American open hearth mill. American steelworkers in 1959 earned hourly wages more than 40% above the national manufacturing average. Wages that their unions had secured through decades of strikes and threatened strikes. Those wages were sustainable only as long as American producers had no serious competition. The moment competition arrived, those labor costs became a weight that the old technology could not carry.
But the lack of innovation wasn't just about furnaces. It was a culture. And that culture had a name, though nobody used it at the time. The Rust Belt's dominant industries, steel, autos, tires, operated as comfortable oligopolies. Prior to 1980, market shares for the major producers in these industries ran as high as 90%. Prices were coordinated through a practice that in steel was politely called "price leadership." US Steel would announce a price and the rest of the industry would follow. Elbert Gary himself had pioneered this system decades earlier through his famous "Gary dinners" where the heads of competing steel firms gathered to agree on pricing and marketing. The word "collusion" was carefully avoided, but the effect was the same. By 1963, the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Committee concluded that there was little, if any, price competition in steel and autos, and it recommended that General Motors be broken up into competing firms. The recommendation went nowhere. In rubber, the Federal Trade Commission in 1959 charged 15 manufacturers with agreeing on common list prices. The US Justice Department charged Ford and General Motors with collusion and the Big Three with conspiring to eliminate competition. None of it changed the behavior. The Big Three automakers faced no meaningful foreign competition until the oil crisis of the 1970s. There was simply put enough business to go around and nobody felt the need to get better.
The American Iron and Steel Institute itself acknowledged the problem, though only in retrospect. Its 1980 annual report noted what careful readers had long suspected: "Inadequate capital formation in the industry had produced meager gains in productivity, upward pressure on prices, sluggish job creation, and faltering economic growth." By the time the industry's own trade group was saying it out loud, the collapse was already underway. Labor productivity growth in the Rust Belt averaged only about 2% per year before 1980 compared with nearly 3% in the rest of the United States. That 1 percentage point gap compounded over three decades was devastating. It meant that by the late 1970s, Rust Belt industries had fallen significantly behind in efficiency, in technology, in the capacity to compete on price.
And the unions, powerful as they were, bore part of the responsibility. Economists have described a "holdup problem." Firms that invested in innovation knew that any resulting profits would have to be bargained over with the unions, which functioned as a de facto tax on the returns to investment. So firms invested less, innovated less, and fell further behind. It was a spiral of shared complacency between management and labor, each side content with the arrangement as long as the money kept flowing. The money stopped.
The first major blow fell on September 19th, 1977, a date that still carries a name in Youngstown, Ohio. They call it "Black Monday." That morning, corporate representatives of Lykes Corporation, a New Orleans shipping company that had acquired Youngstown Sheet and Tube in 1969, flew into the Pittsburgh airport, held a board meeting, and announced that the Campbell Works, the larger of Sheet and Tube's two local mills, would be closing immediately. 5,000 workers were laid off, most of them receiving no advanced notice. "You feel the whole area is doomed somehow," the wife of a laid-off worker told reporters. "If this can happen to us, there is not a secure union job in the country."
The backstory made it worse. Youngstown Sheet and Tube had been founded in 1900 by local industrialists, men like George D. Wick and James Anson Campbell, who believed that steel companies should be owned by the communities they served. Local ownership was more than sentiment in Youngstown. It was a safeguard, a way to make sure that the people making decisions about the mills had a stake in the neighborhoods those mills supported. At its peak, Sheet and Tube was the largest corporation in Ohio. Then in 1969, it was swallowed by Lykes Corporation, a New Orleans-based shipping company 1/6th its size. Justice Department investigators had recommended blocking the merger, arguing that the steel company wouldn't survive under Lykes's debt load. They were overruled by US Attorney General John Mitchell, who would later become infamous for his role in Watergate. Lykes proceeded to drain Youngstown Sheet and Tube's cash flow, telling suppliers they'd now be paid in 60 days instead of 30, using the freed-up cash to pay down its own acquisition debt rather than invest in the mills. The open hearth furnaces in Youngstown, the ones that needed to be replaced with basic oxygen furnaces, never were. Workers saw what was happening. They knew they needed the new technology, but the money went to Lykes, and they were left with the open hearths. By the time the company was done, the mills were held together, in the words of one union official, "with bailing wire and tape."
Within 5 years of Black Monday, 50,000 jobs vanished from the Mahoning Valley. Over $1.3 billion in annual wages disappeared. Unemployment hit nearly 25%. An estimated 400 smaller businesses that had depended on the steel industry's paychecks—restaurants, car dealerships, dry cleaners, hardware stores—closed. US Steel soon followed, shutting its Ohio Works in Youngstown in 1979. Republic Steel went bankrupt in the mid-1980s. Pat Ungaro, who had been a city councilman on Black Monday and later served as Youngstown's mayor from 1984 to 1997, described the effect as less a ripple and more a tidal wave. The population of Youngstown, which had peaked at 170,000, began a freefall that would bring it below 65,000. A city that once had one of the highest homeownership rates in the country found itself budgeting for demolitions. The Mahoning Valley's most significant new industry, according to one local attorney who spent 20 years handling the aftermath, was the construction of three large prisons. Youngstown became a prison town. And Youngstown was only the beginning.
In the fall of 1952, there had been more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs across southwestern Pennsylvania. Four out of every 10 workers in the region. By the early 1980s, that world was gone. Pittsburgh lost 90,000 steel jobs between 1980 and 1984 alone, a halving of its steelworking workforce in 4 years. Mill after mill went dark. The Duquesne Steel Works, which had employed as many as 9,000 people in the 1940s, closed on October 1st, 1984. The Homestead Steel Works, site of the infamous 1892 strike, one of the most important in American labor history, shut down. By the end of the 1980s, 75% of Pittsburgh's steelmaking capacity was shuttered. 150,000 steel mill workers were laid off by the early 1980s.
In Gary, the workforce at Gary Works fell from 32,000 in 1970 to 7,000 by 2005. The city's population dropped 61% from its peak. By 1990, only 6,000 workers remained at the mill that had once been the world's largest. *Time* magazine in 1972 had already described Gary as "sitting like an ash heap in the northwest corner of Indiana." By the early 1990s, its nickname had changed from the "magic city" to the "murder capital." Nearly 7,000 buildings stood abandoned. About one in three parcels of land in the city sat vacant. A landscape of empty lots where houses had been torn down or had simply caved in on themselves.
Detroit's agony played out on a different timeline, but with the same underlying cause. The Big Three had spent decades ignoring the possibility that anyone could build cars as well as they could. Between 1945 and 1957, the automakers built 25 new manufacturing plants in the Detroit metropolitan area. Not one of them was located in the city itself. All were in the suburbs where land was cheaper and union influence weaker. This was the beginning of the population drain, and it was accelerated by the construction of freeways that made suburban commuting possible while demolishing entire urban neighborhoods. The Edsel Ford Expressway was laid directly through the heart of the Black Bottom business district. The Edsel Ford Expressway required the demolition of more than 2,800 buildings, including jazz nightclubs, churches, and family homes. A letter found in historical archives from a resident named Mrs. Grace Black captured what that displacement felt like: "A family of six turned down everywhere because they had children desperately searching for a house."
Then came the 1973 oil crisis. Gasoline prices spiked. American automakers, who had built their business around large, heavy, gas-hungry vehicles, were suddenly competing with Japanese and German manufacturers who had spent years perfecting smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Chrysler narrowly avoided bankruptcy in the late 1970s, only with the help of a federal bailout. General Motors shuttered its colossal Dodge Main plant in 1980, a facility that had employed more than 30,000 people at its peak. Ford's Highland Park plant, the birthplace of the assembly line, ceased operations in 1974, a casualty of the oil crisis's fallout. By 1980, 34% of Detroit's population was white, down from 83% in 1950. 90,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared during the 1980s alone. On Devil's Night 1984, arsonists set 810 fires across the city in a single evening. An annual tradition of destruction that had escalated beyond anyone's ability to contain it. Detroit's population, which had been 1.85 million in 1950, fell to 713,000 by 2010. The city's finances had been built on the assumption of a minimum tax base of 750,000 people. And when the population dropped below that floor, the math simply stopped working. In 2013, the city filed for municipal bankruptcy, $18 billion in debt, the largest such filing in American history. The Packard Motorcar Factory, 3.5 million square feet, opened in 1903, stood abandoned for decades, the largest ruined industrial building in the world before finally being demolished in the 2020s.
Cleveland lost more than half its population, falling from 915,000 to 372,000. The city that had been mocked in the 1970s as the "mistake on the lake" continued to shrink. Decade after decade, Buffalo went from 580,000 to 278,000. St. Louis dropped from 857,000 to 301,000, a 65% decline, the steepest of any major American city. Flint, Michigan, which had been built almost entirely around General Motors, became synonymous with urban crisis. Akron lost 35,000 jobs when Goodrich, Firestone, and General Tire closed their production lines, ending its run as the rubber capital of the world.
One detail makes those numbers even more revealing. In many cases, the metropolitan areas around these cities actually grew. Detroit's metro population expanded from 3.17 million to 4.39 million even as the city itself lost 2/3 of its people. What happened was not simply that people left the region. People with the means to leave moved to surrounding suburbs, draining the city's tax base while the cost of maintaining roads, sewers, and schools—infrastructure built for a much larger population—remained the same. A city that loses a third of its people still has to plow the same miles of road. The per-person cost of running the city goes up at precisely the moment there are fewer people to share it. The spiral feeds itself.
The aggregate numbers are almost hard to absorb. US manufacturing employment peaked in June 1979 at 19.6 million workers. Over the next four decades, 6.7 million of those jobs vanished. The Rust Belt absorbed a disproportionate share of that loss. Between 1969 and 1996, manufacturing employment declined by 33% in the region. Steel production nationally peaked at 111.4 million tons in 1973. By 1984, it had collapsed to 70 million. Steel employment went from 650,000 in 1953 to 236,000 in 1984. By 2015, the number was 142,000. By 2025, it was 83,000, roughly 1/8 of what it had been at the peak. The man-hours needed to produce a ton of finished steel, which had been 10.1 in 1980, dropped to 1.5 by 2017. The steel industry, in other words, eventually did modernize. It just did so by replacing people with machines. And by then, the cities those people had built were already hollowed out.
One detail makes the tragedy almost operatic. In the early 1980s, with the steel crisis at its worst, the Reagan administration granted substantial tax breaks to American steel companies specifically so they could modernize their mills and compete with foreign producers. US Steel took the money. In March 1982, it used those concessions plus $1.4 billion in cash and $4.7 billion in loans to buy Marathon Oil, saving approximately $500 million in taxes through the merger. Not a penny went to new furnaces. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who had been one of the architects of those tax breaks, said publicly, "We go out on a limb in Congress, and we feel they should be putting it in steel." Four years later, in 1986, US Steel changed its name to USX Corporation to reflect the fact that steel was no longer its primary business. By the 1990s, Marathon Oil represented more than 80% of the company's revenues. The corporation, the titan that had produced 2/3 of America's steel in its first year of existence, had effectively quit the business that had built it.
Think about what happened in that sequence. Congress gave steel companies tax breaks to save the industry that employed hundreds of thousands of people across the region. The largest steel company in the country took the money and bought an oil company. The workers in Youngstown and Gary and Pittsburgh and Cleveland, the people whose jobs those tax breaks were supposed to protect were left with nothing. And the company renamed itself as though the word "steel" had become an embarrassment.
The Rust Belt's decline is often told as a story of many causes: globalization, automation, trade policy, union power, the rise of the Sun Belt, the invention of air conditioning. And all of those factors played a role. But the research is increasingly clear on one point. A 2014 study by economists Simeon Alder, David Lagakos, and Lee O'Hanian at the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that the lack of competitive pressure in the Rust Belt's product and labor markets—the comfortable monopolies, the unchallenged pricing, the wages negotiated without regard to productivity—accounted for approximately 2/3 of the region's decline in employment share between 1950 and 2000. Not trade with China, not NAFTA, not robots. The single largest cause was that the Rust Belt's own industries, fat with wartime profits and post-war dominance, stopped competing. That is the one mistake. Not a decision made in a boardroom on a single afternoon, but a collective decision made by executives, by union leaders, by politicians year after year for three decades to act as though dominance was permanent. To treat the open hearth furnace as though it would never be replaced, to assume that because Japan and Germany had been flattened, they would stay flattened, to pay steelworkers 40% above the national manufacturing average while investing less in new technology than any comparable industry, to believe that a region producing 45% of the nation's GDP had nothing to worry about.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter had warned about exactly this in 1942, writing that "the competition that truly destroys firms is not the kind that nibbles at margins, but the kind that comes from new technology and new organization, competition that strikes at foundations and at the very lives of existing enterprises." That is precisely what happened. It was the mistake of the man who inherits a fortune and never bothers to learn how money works because the checks keep clearing until one day they don't.
Every night in the 1950s in Youngstown, the sky glowed orange from the furnaces. Retired steelworker Ken Dickey, who grew up in the shadow of the Brier Hill mill, remembered it vividly. "As a kid, I could hear the clanging steel at night," he said. "And by the time I went to work there, I knew what all those sounds meant." The furnaces had steam whistles: a noon whistle for lunch, a 3:00 whistle for the shift change. People set their clocks by those sounds. When the mills ran, the river valley was alive with noise and light, 24 hours a day. When the mills stopped, the silence was the thing people mentioned first. Not the unemployment, not the foreclosures—the silence.
Today, Gary's City Methodist Church, the Gothic masterpiece built with US Steel money in 1926, stands roofless and open to the sky, one of the most photographed ruins in America. You need a permit to approach it. In Youngstown, the blast furnace from the old Sheet and Tube works is referenced in a 1995 Bruce Springsteen song called "Youngstown," in which a steelworker addresses the furnace directly, recounting the wars it helped win and the way the owners discarded the workers who fed it. In Detroit, the 3.5 million sq ft Packard Motorcar Factory, opened in 1903, shuttered decades ago, is finally being demolished after years as the largest abandoned industrial ruin in the world. The Michigan Central Station, a Beaux-Arts train station that Ford Motor Company abandoned in 1988 and left standing empty for 30 years, was recently converted into a corporate innovation hub. The irony is not subtle. A building that once connected a manufacturing city to the world by rail now houses people whose job it is to imagine the future of an industry that nearly killed the city.
In Pittsburgh, the US Steel Tower still dominates the skyline. 64 stories clad in Corten steel that weathers to a dark reddish-brown. From certain angles, it looks like rust. It was built in 1970, at the very moment the steel industry began its long contraction. As though the corporation wanted one last monument to itself. Pittsburgh has recovered better than most of its peers, reinventing itself around healthcare, higher education, and technology. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center alone employs more than 50,000 people and generates $7 billion in annual revenue—numbers that rival what the steel industry produced at its height. But Pittsburgh is the exception. For every Pittsburgh, there is a Gary, a Youngstown, a Flint—a place where the population halved and the tax base cratered and the spiral fed itself until the city could no longer maintain the roads and schools and police departments that its infrastructure was built to support.
The Rust Belt's share of America's GDP went from 45% in 1950 to 27% by the turn of the century. Its manufacturing share went from 56% to 32%. These are not numbers that describe a regional setback. They describe the collapse of an empire. And the furnace, the open hearth furnace, the machine that defined the region, the technology its owners refused to abandon, the last one in the United States was shut down in 1992. By that time, the basic oxygen process that American steelmakers had been too comfortable to adopt had already been in commercial use for 40 years.
In June of 2025, US Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation, the company that built Gary from a swamp and employed 340,000 people at its wartime peak, was acquired by Nippon Steel of Japan. The sale price was $14 billion. For context, that is roughly what Walmart generates in revenue every 2 weeks. The deal had been politically contentious. Both President Biden and President Trump initially opposed it, and the United Steelworkers Union fought it, but the numbers told a story that patriotism couldn't rewrite. Nippon pledged $11 billion to modernize the mills. The company that once produced 2/3 of all American steel now produces about 8%, and it is owned by a foreign competitor whose country rebuilt its mills with the technology that American executives looked at in the 1950s and decided they didn't need.
In the 1980s, it had not been uncommon to see angry workers in the Mahoning Valley smashing Japanese cars with sledgehammers, blaming imports for their lost jobs. Now, those workers' grandchildren are employed by a Japanese corporation. Somewhere in Youngstown, if you drive out to where the Campbell Works used to be, there is a stretch of vacant land along the Mahoning River. The mills are gone. The furnaces are gone. The whistles are gone. The sky at night, for the first time in 150 years, is dark.